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Business Insider
24-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
'Self-taught' real estate investors say 3 books helped them go from owning 0 rental units to more than 100
Letizia Alto and Kenji Asakura started buying rental properties in 2015 to free themselves from 80-hour workweeks. The physician couple, who met while working at the same hospital, were essentially starting from scratch. Asakura had dipped his toe into real estate investing in the early 2000s — he was mostly buying and reselling land — and lost money during the 2008 housing market crash, while Alto had never owned property. Their first investments were two duplexes, which they purchased with money they'd earmarked to buy a primary residence. They wouldn't buy a primary home until 2022, but in the interim, they continued expanding their rental portfolio. As of 2025, they own more than 100 units. The rental income has allowed them to step back from the hospital, spend more time with each other and their kids, and build their online community, Semi-Retired MD. "We were self-taught," Asakura told Business Insider. Alto added, "We were reading all the time." The couple, who live in Puerto Rico for about half of the year and spend the other half traveling, shared the three books that helped them scale their real estate business. " Rich Dad Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki The couple read Robert Kiyosaki's personal finance classic, which is particularly popular within the real estate investor community, before buying their first property together. They were on their honeymoon, traveling in a camper van through New Zealand. Without electricity, they passed the nights reading "Rich Dad Poor Dad," and some of the author's core themes resonated. "It was really powerful. We were like: 'Oh, my gosh, this is it: We're employees, we trade our time for money, we're never going to be able to be in Italy for three months at a time because we're always going to have to be working,'" said Alto, whose dream was to spend more time traveling. "The only way it works is if we have another source of income, outside medicine, that can replace part of our salaries so that we can have the freedom to take time off." Shortly after returning from New Zealand, with Kiyosaki's lessons on their mind, they bought their first two duplexes. " How to Use Limited Liability Companies and Limited Partnerships" by Garrett Sutton Books like Garrett Sutton's about LLCs have helped them expand their business knowledge, which has been key to their success. "I think a big differentiator is that we apply a lot of business principles to our rental business," said Asakura. "A lot of people don't think about rental properties as a business — they think about it as providing housing — but ultimately, each property is a mini-business." " The Millionaire Real Estate Investor" by Gary Keller Gary Keller's book explores real estate investing strategies and practical, actionable advice. The couple said they built their cash-on-cash calculator, which helps them ensure a property will generate positive cash flow before closing, based on the one provided in Keller's book. It also gave them the confidence that they could succeed in the real estate investing world. The author incorporates interviews with more than 100 millionaire real estate investors with all sorts of backgrounds. "We could see that people just like us could do it," said Alto, adding that confidence is just as important as executing your investment strategy. "If you don't believe it's possible, then you're always going to look for the reasons it's not going to work, and you're going to be stuck in analysis paralysis for the rest of your life."
Yahoo
07-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
I owned 10 properties. Their value skyrocketed, and I walked away from it all.
Seth Jones had a rule for real estate investing: Rent out homes for 1% or more of their value. He sold his 10 properties and put the money into an exchange-traded-fund portfolio. Jones says life is easier without the headaches that come with property management. This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Seth Jones, 36, who lives in Port Orange, Florida, about 20 minutes south of Daytona Beach. Jones started buying investment properties in 2015 and then began selling them off in 2020 to put his money elsewhere. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. When I was younger, I read books like "Rich Dad, Poor Dad," and "The Millionaire Real Estate Investor." That's all I wanted to do. When I left the military at 22, the first thing I did was get a job as a real-estate agent because I thought it would help me become an investor. My wife and I moved to Port Orange, Florida, in 2013 to be closer to her parents. I quickly realized Florida was saturated with agents. Even back then, there were only a small number of really good mortgage brokers. So I pivoted. It took some time because I had to develop the right credentials. I became a personal banker with a regional bank and worked there for about a year and a half. Eventually, I became the branch manager. The entire time, I was working on my licensing to become a mortgage broker. For years, my wife and I were hyper-focused on saving money. My wife is a teacher, and we lived only off her salary. All of my income went into saving to buy properties. We hardly ever ate out and never went to bars. My faith is really important to me, so I spent a lot of time around people in the church, which made it easier. A lot of the people in the church live pretty simply, so we didn't do a lot of things socially or travel-wise, either. The goal was to get to 100 doors. That was my entire focus. I just wanted to build a real-estate business that would eventually support me and my family, and I wanted to do it as fast as possible. I didn't purchase my first property until 2014. They were actually two, each with three bedrooms under $60,000. I was able to pay 15% down. I'm very conservative by nature. Fundamentals have always mattered to me. It's been frustrating to me that in the aftermath of 2008, a lot of people developed a mindset that real estate just doesn't go down in value. I developed a rule as a mortgage broker that I often call the 1% rule. It's very simple, back-of-the-napkin math. When I look at a property, the first thing I look for is whether the monthly rent I can charge for it is greater than 1% of the home's value. So on a $100,000 property, am I able to rent it out for $1,000 per month? On a $200,000 property, am I able to rent it out for $2,000 per month? It's not ironclad and doesn't always make or break a purchase. But I use it as a guidepost and for quick analysis of a deal. After the first two properties, I was able to grow rather quickly. In 2018, I opened my first mortgage brokerage, which increased my income and gave us more resources to invest with. By 2019, I was able to target higher-quality properties in top school districts. My 10th and last purchase was a property in Lexington, South Carolina, that I bought for $138,000 in February 2020. By that point, I had realized I had been concentrating all my risk in Florida. I started to get worried about the impacts of a big hurricane and wanted to diversify my portfolio out of state. Doing my research, western South Carolina seemed fairly insulated from national disasters, and I found a good school district in Lexington. I ended up with a 10-property portfolio. In the real estate investing world, everyone used to talk about cash flow. Sometime around 2019, I noticed a shift in focus. I listen to a lot of financial podcasts, and I heard everyone's focus change from cash-flow-oriented to appreciation-oriented. That's just never how I've looked at underwriting deals. At the beginning of COVID, I anticipated property values were going to be stressed and would potentially go down. Obviously, the opposite happened. I watched things take off. I wasn't sure what was going to happen moving forward, but the fundamentals started to change. I used Reventure, a data aggregator for real estate, pretty extensively. It pulls in data from a lot of different sources, and I would track price-to-rent ratios for the local market. For property values, I've used every website, but I prefer Redfin. I find it to be the most accurate, and I like the feature where you can see comparable sales. I sold two properties in 2019, three in 2020, three in 2021, one in 2022, and one in 2023. The biggest appreciation was a home I purchased for $190,000 that I was able to sell for $500,000. I put all our resources into liquid assets — a diversified, multi-asset exchange-traded-fund portfolio of fundamentally sound stocks (SCHD), gold (IAU), long-term treasuries (SCHQ), and short-term treasuries (SCHO). I have no regrets, and I think that I'll be vindicated once we have some type of correction. I have people who tell me I'm an idiot for selling off my properties. They think they could've made 10 times what I did in real estate. I do think real estate is a great tool to build wealth, but it's also true that fundamentals matter. There's a significant difference in my headspace coming from not owning real estate. From a liability perspective, I have no external worries. No one's going to get hurt. I'm not dealing with late-night phone calls. There is still stress in trading stocks and equities. You don't see a ticker on a house going up and down all the time, but life is way simpler. Read the original article on Business Insider
